Resourceful No Knife is slicing through traditional rock

By Mark FaulknerSpecial to the Times-Union,

It's bands like No Knife that make one think that rock music may actually survive.

This San Diego quartet's new CD, Fire in the City of Automatons (Time Bomb Records) is by no means traditional rock 'n' roll. There are no huge arena-rocking anthems, nor quiet odes about society's ills. There are no gaudy guitar solos, nor any quick and easy pop gems.

Instead, No Knife, which performs tomorrow at Jack Rabbits, has built a deep, rich and textured sound on top of the traditional rock format.

NO KNIFE

No Knife will perform tomorrow at Jack Rabbits, 1528 Hendricks Ave. with Jimmy Eat World and Smell of Wonder. Doors open at 8 p.m. For more information, call (904) 398-7496.

Both the music and the lyrics run in a near stream-of-consciousness. Mitch Wilson, the lead singer for the majority of the material, sings his songs from the first person most of the time, telling stories in such an abstract way that there is really nothing to be gained from trying to understand them. Listening to Wilson sing is like taking an audio tour of a photography exhibit with a bad copy of the tape - you can only make out the occasional idea or feeling of the pictures he is describing, and rarely do you get enough information to understand the work as a whole.

Take these elliptical lyrics from their song, The Spy, in which Wilson sings: ''With a heart full of holes, and a head full of dreams/ With a mouth full of honey, a fist full of bees/ Somewhere there's a quiet place. There's a quiet place somewhere/ I think I caught what you had. Not that you would care.''

Bands like No Knife and its independent label rock brethren - such as Sunny Day Real Estate, Guided By Voices and Built To Spill - have taken what they like of rock music, and then lifted the sound to a different plane.

And while Fire in the City of Automatons may not exceed the expectations of devotees of the other groups, the album shows No Knife has ample promise. While all of this is very familiar, songs like Mission Control, a masterful homage of sorts to David Bowie's Space Oddity, shows No Knife's potential to make truly stunning music.

Rock music isn't dead. It's simple reinventing itself as it has many times over its brief lifespan to keep current not only with its listeners, but also with the musicians making the music themselves. In the hands of bands like No Knife, rock music will never die. It will simply grow in a direction that no one thought possible.